Connelly: 'Three Cups of Tea' author falls to earth

Published 11:27 pm, Tuesday, April 19, 2011

The renowned mountain climber/med professor/author Tom Hornbein ("Everest: The West Ridge"), on a March day in 2001, asked me to meet a young Montanan driven by a dream of building schools in Balti villages of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

Greg Mortenson joined us for breakfast, and held us mesmerized with the tale of coming down battered after climbing to 27,000 feet on K2, regaining his health in the village of Korphe, and resolving to return and create classrooms in remote towns at the headwaters of the Indus River.

A quote from the column suggested Mortenson's future book title: "In their culture it takes three cups of tea to do anything." The piece celebrated Mortenson for persuading Shi'ite Muslim authorities to allow girls into his schools. Patsy Bullitt Collins, the Seattle philanthropist, wrote a $100,000 check to Mortenson's Central Asia Institute.

The story took a different turn: Mortenson proved a fumbling administrator of money. Hornbein would resign as board chairman of the Central Asia Institute in 2002, just as Mortenson's reputation, influence and income began to gain altitude. The warning flag was ignored.

Now, we watch "60 Minutes" and read what Hornbein calls the "depressingly awesome" exposé by climber/author Jon Krakauer ("Into Thin Air"). It exposes Mortenson's shortcomings as truth-teller, school builder and philanthropist. Krakauer starts out by debunking the Korphe recovery story.

Its title, "Three Cups of Deceit," is a morph on "Three Cups of Tea," the best-seller (5 million copies) that the U.S. military encourages Afghanistan-bound soldiers to read. Mortenson is listed as lead author, but now claims coauthor David Oliver Relin "did nearly all the writing."

The world's underachieving scoffers enjoy the sight of a falling icon. The media love to report it. "The Today Show" has in the past lionized Mortenson. On Tuesday, however, a hit piece by Andrea Mitchell evoked memories of a trek when I watched a Himalayan vulture dive onto and peck at the carcass of a dead goat.

Joel Connelly has been a staff columnist for more than 30 years. He comments regularly on politics and public policy.

Krakauer can be brutally blunt -- witness the unsparing treatment he accords Seattle-based guide Scott Fisher, who died on Everest, in "Into Thin Air." With Mortenson, however, he provides clear perspective -- even while exposing someone in whose cause he once invested $75,000: "Mortenson started with noble intentions and a great idea. He has built dozens of schools that have educated thousands of kids in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He deserves credit for that. But very soon after he launched CAI, he lost his moral bearings. He betrayed the trust of countless people, myself included."

Greg Mortenson wanted to be his generation's Sir Edmund Hillary. One of the first two climbers to summit Everest, in 1953, the former New Zealand beekeeper returned to the Khumbu region of Nepal and did multiple good works.

After an American Himalayan Foundation dinner marking the climb's 50th anniversary, Hillary and his wife greeted Mortenson at breakfast in San Francisco's posh Fairmont Hotel.

Hillary never let his head be turned, and so it was over breakfast at the Fairmont. He deflected all praise and turned talk of the schools, clinics and bridges he had built for the Sherpa people who guide Western climbers to the roof of the world.

The tall guy joked, at dinner and breakfast, about his low profile. He recalled a trek up to Namche Bazaar, and being stopped by a German trekker who admonished him, "I should tell you that the way you are holding your ice axe is completely wrong." Setting out for the Tengboche Monastery, Hillary was stopped by an American who told him, "I think you should know you are in for a long, steep hike."

Hillary was to experience grief in his beloved Himalayas. His first wife and daughter were killed in an airplane crash. A son fought (and eventually defeated) a heroin habit. But Hillary towered over subsequent generations of self-absorbed climbers. (Admen for Rolex made him stand in a six-inch hole in the snow when filming a watch ad featuring Hillary and a much shorter Reinhold Messner.)

CBS' "60 Minutes" and Krakauer have shown pictures of shoddy and vacant schools built by Mortenson's institute. Hillary built schools to last. Trekking through the Khumbu some years back, I watched Sherpa kids bounding past, en route from Nache up to Hillary's pioneering school in Khumjung. They gained 900 vertical feet on the morning "walk" to school.

At remote Thami, just south of the Tibetan border, a school building made of rock, with a wind-resistant iron roof, allowed kids to learn of the modern world while nearby at the monastery the most ancient of Buddhist rites were celebrated.

Hillary reached the summit of the world at a time when celebrity culture was limited to Hollywood. The bee farmer did find himself at Buckingham Palace, being tapped on each shoulder by Queen Elizabeth II and commanded, "Arise, Sir Edmund."

As a celebrity in today's world, however, Greg Mortenson found himself knighted by Charlie Rose, invited to advise the Joint Chiefs on winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan, and the recipient of $100,000 in President Obama's Nobel Prize money.

Mortenson in 2001 to 2002 would come to Seattle and talk to 100 people in the third floor corner room of REI. A few years later, he would command $30,000 lecture fees; CAI would spend $1.4 million in 2009 to fly Mortenson around the country, often in chartered jets.

No way can he escape accusations of betrayal. American school kids donated $1.7 million in 2009 to Pennies for Peace, a Mortenson program designed to pay for teachers' salaries, school supplies and operation of schools in remote Asian villages. Alas, CAI's 2009 outlay for these expenses came to $612,000.

Mortenson has gone to ground of late, rebuffing a "60 Minutes" ambush interview. He talked briefly to the Bozeman Chronicle, describing as a "compression of events" episodes related in his best-selling book. He fumbled and rambled in a discussion with the editor of "Outside."

The vultures aren't done. Viking is reexamining claims in his book. He may owe CAI and the IRS a pot of money for what the institute has spent (over $1 million in 2009) to promote his books and fly him around the country. Big givers did get a caressing email, but are not likely to stick with him. Ex-CAI employees are feeding the exposés.

What to take of this? The guy brought it on himself, of course. He is being humiliated by the media who built him up. Mortenson is even going under the knife for heart surgery this week.

But ... kids wanting to go to school in Baltistan and Kundur Province may end up paying a greater price -- if donors in the far-off First World dismiss all help efforts as fraud. The United States may pay, as well. Bombs kill Taliban warriors; schools take away the Taliban's ability to recruit.

I brought a copy of Fosco Marani's "Karakoram" to our breakfast a decade ago. It has in back a map of K2 and its environs. Mortenson talked about villages, including those within artillery range of the world's highest war (Pakistan and India shelling each other across the Siachen Glacier).

The guy knew his way around the roof of the world. He stumbled back in America. The thin air of celebrityhood would do more to his head than the oxygen deprivation high on K2. A frantic public schedule would deprive Mortenson of the patience and perspective acquired over those three cups of tea.

My suggestion for rehabilitation: community service back in Baltistan.

Columnist Joel Connelly has written about politics for the P-I since 1973.